“Figured it out yet?” Chris asked, his own gun ready, blinking red light from the sights nailed to the spot between Jorge’s eyes. “Meet my twin. The Marcellos say hello, but me? I only want to say fuck you.”
He pulled back the trigger.
He didn’t care to let the man talk.
Jorge just needed to die.
Chris watched the bullet rip through the man’s head, sending him flying back into the windowsill where he’d been standing to shoot. His body damn near flipped out the window, but instead, hung there.
“How far are they away?” he heard his twin ask.
“Not far now, I imagine. And thanks.”
Chris looked Corrado’s way.
His twin shrugged.
“Wasn’t a big thing,” Corrado murmured.
That was a lie.
This was a huge thing.
“Sometimes, let me watch your back,” Corrado said. “It can’t always be you looking out for me, man. That’s all.”
Chris nodded. “Sometimes. We have to wait, now.”
“For what?”
“The white flag.”
A false surrender.
• • •
“Alto—para!”
The command cut through the air when a figure, womanly in her shape with a white rag held high, emerged through the smoke in the middle of the dirt road. With her head tilted down, the darkness behind her form made her quite a sight with the gray cloud lingering in the air.
The shouts for the firing to stop came again, louder the second time. Through the broken windows of the house, the men of the García cartel passed verbal orders between them, one at a time.
Stop.
Stop the firing.
Halt.
Repeatedly until the bullets stopped flying, and a silence settled over the ranch. Oh, there was still noise, sure. Hooves clattering in the distance, and the crackle of flames from buildings that were still burning to the ground.
The war, though?
All at once, it stopped.
“Where is Samuel?” Chris asked.
Corrado glanced his way. “What?”
“The other brother—Samuel Lòpez.”
“Never saw him.”
Chris wasn’t even sure his brother knew what the man looked like, but perhaps Jorge had been so distracted in the gunfight he’d forgotten about his other sibling. It didn’t matter as he had other things to focus on right now.
Like the woman outside.
Abril kept her head tilted down low as she walked the road, one slow step at a time. Still, she kept her hand and that white rag high, a clear signal that the Lòpezs were giving up. During his time in the house, he pinned down where the leader of the other side had been hiding out—in a barn that didn’t burn—because the García men flanked the structure from all directions, never turning back to retreat, but only facing forward to keep anyone from getting too close.
Chris hadn’t been wrong.
The man that emerged from the barn, hands free of a weapon, dressed differently than the rest. He carried himself differently even in his steps—confident and sure. A war had been raging all around him, and yet the man’s suit looked tailored to his form and without even a speck of dust on the dark fabric.
He tipped his head back as he came closer to Abril, a pleased smirk curving his lips as though he just caught his prey.
“Abril,” the man—Roberto García, the man Abril would have to marry through an arrangement made by her father—called about thirty feet away from the approaching woman, “Thank you for helping me.”
Abril said nothing.
She kept walking.
“What’s happening?” Corrado asked.
Chris made a noise under his breath. “With her, you never know.”
It wasn’t a lie.
The García men gathered behind their leader, allowing Chris a quick count of the remaining men on their side of things. About twenty, he thought. How many were here before?
Twenty wasn’t a large number though.
Easily handled.
Twenty also wasn’t the entire cartel, but Chris bet Roberto had been smart enough to bring what would be more than he needed to strong-arm the ranch under his control. His mistake to assume, however.
He’d learn soon enough.
Abril and Roberto stood face to face before they spoke again. Abril stared up at him, her face a mask of nothingness. She gave nothing away—the calm in the eye of a hurricane.
Chris thought ... God help the souls who come up against her.
She would be a force.
“You’ve given me all I wanted, princesa,” Roberto said clearly, his voice traveling over the silent ranch to reach even Chris’s spot in the window, “I have the cartels, and I have you.”
Abril laughed light and sweet, her lips curving salaciously at what he implied. “Is that really what you think?”
Roberto stiffened. “I don’t—”
“I only needed to make this easy,” Abril interjected, her gaze burning as she dropped that white rag to the ground, “and round you up like dogs.”
Roberto took a step back.
Abril dropped to the ground, body flat on the dirt as a line of figures came out of the smoky darkness where she first emerged. The team arrived, it seemed, and Chris finally figured out where Samuel Lòpez had gone.
It looked like he’d been waiting on his sister. Everyone had loyalties. Rarely did others know what they were though.
The Garcías made it easy on the team by gathering behind their leader. Samuel fired his AK first, peppering Roberto García with at least fifteen bullets before the man’s bloodied body fell back to the ground.
Abril covered her head.
The team moved in.
Chris looked to Corrado. “Time to go.”
“We should stay out of Mexico for a while, huh?”
“Oh, yeah.”
Most certainly.
19.
Valeria thought she knew what exhaustion was, but she had no idea until she was in the backseat of a town car, driving through dark streets, and feeling like if she closed her eyes, she would instantly fall asleep. She didn’t know where Alessio was driving to, and he didn’t answer many questions once he had guided their boat to a port where he paid a waiting man a bribe to look the other way.
Still, Valeria forced her eyes to stay peeled open even as her daughter had fallen asleep with her head in her mother’s lap. The kitten—she still wasn’t sure how Maria snuck the cat into her bag—slept happily on the floor of the car near her feet, unbothered by the occasional swaying of the vehicle.
“Not long now,” she heard Alessio say from the front.
“Oh?”
“We’ll be staying at a hotel for just long enough to get the jet in the air.”
Valeria glanced up, confused. “The jet?”
“Compliments of your friend. They also brought papers along—forged, mind you—that will get the two of you through customs without problems when the time comes. We need to keep moving. The others will follow, but through their own plans.”
She still didn’t understand.
Her tired brain again.
“They will be okay, right?” she asked.
Alessio’s gaze darted to the rear-view mirror, meeting hers for a moment before he put his attention back on the road ahead of them where it needed to be. “They better be.”